Monthly Archives: September 2010

Lots of great reading

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So with summer having now sped by I haven’t done a reading update in quite some time… here’s a quickie:

1. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

For a subject that sounds like it should completely bore you – the history of finance – this book is brilliant and, frankly, fun. It’s also timely. The financial system is so old that we often forget that it actually emerged out of something. Money, bonds, stocks, all that good stuff, it hasn’t always been around. WE of course know this, but it is great to actually be walked through how it all emerged, especially when its so wonderful told. It’s also nice to take a look at an old system, like finance, which we are now as comfortable with as the air we breath (even, when at times, it turns toxic and crashes our economy) as so much of my time is spent looking at relatively newer systems – digital networks and the internet. Lots of lessons could be drawn, especially around trust networks (something here for Shirky while he’s at Berkman?).

One additional point. I initially started watching the PBS series by the same name which is based on the book and also hosted by Niall Ferguson but was not really riveted by it. It was somewhat slow moving and lacked the historical depth and arc the book has… so if you saw the TV documentaries and were turned off, not to worry, the book is definitely working picking up.

2. How Government HR Processes are Broken

Check out this fantastic post by an anonymous public servant in Gatineau. It’s a deadly piece about how broken hiring practices are in government and how it’s unsurprising some would be driven away. It would make you laugh if it weren’t making you cry. Got this from a public servant, then after tweeting it, a bunch more noted to me how painfully true it felt to them. Sigh.

3. David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization

It’s hard(er) to do visualizations without open data. Here’s some beautiful ones from England.

We are going to make a better world, nudging and learning

4. An interview with David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack, creators of a new app for booking/sharing rides in New York

A fantastic interview about how we can share resources to get around more quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using technology. A riff off of Robin’s Chases’ ZipCar idea but its not about sharing cars, but sharing rides. This is the future of urban transportation. That is, of course, if Ontario’s bus companies don’t try to outlaw it.

Saving Cities Millions: Introducing CivicCommons.com

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Last year, after speaking at the MISA West conference I blogged about an idea I’d called Muniforge (It was also published in the Municipal Information Systems Association’s journal Municipal Interface but behind a paywall). The idea was to create a repository like SourceForge that could host open source software code developed by and/or for cities to share with one another. A few months later I followed it up with another post Saving Millions: Why Cities should Fork the Kuali Foundation which chronicled how a coalition of universities have been doing something similar (they call it community source) and have been saving themselves millions of dollars.

Last week at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC my friends over at OpenPlans, with who I’ve exchanged many thoughts about this idea, along with the City of Washington DC brought this idea to life with the launch of Civic Commons. It’s an exciting project that has involved the work of a lot of people: Phillip Ashlock at OpenPlans who isn’t in the video below deserves a great deal of congratulations, as does the team over at Code for America who were also not on the stage.

At the moment Civic Commons is a sort of whitepages for open sourced civic government applications and policies. It doesn’t actually host the software it just points you to where the licenses and code reside (say, for example, at GitHub). There are lots of great tools out there for collaborating on software that don’t need replicating, instead Civic Commons is trying to foster community, a place where cities can find projects they’d like to leverage or contribute to.

The video below outlines it all in more detail. If you find it interesting (or want to skip it and get to that action right away) take a look at the Civic Commons.com website, there are already a number of applications being shared and worked on. I’m also thrilled to share that I’ve been asked to be an adviser to Civic Commons, so more on that and what it means for non-American cities, after the video.

One thing that comes through when looking at this video is the sense this is a distinctly American project. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, during a planning meeting on Thursday I mentioned that a few Canadian cities have contacted me about software applications they would like to make open source to share with other municipalities, everyone and especially Bryan Sivak (CIO for Washington, DC) was keen that other countries join and partake in Civic Commons.

It may end up that municipalities in other countries wish to create their own independent project. That is fine (I’m in favour of diverse approaches), but in the interim I’m keen to have some international participation early on so that processes and issues it raises will be addressed and baked into the project early on. If you work at a city and are thinking that you’d like to add a project feel free to contact me, but also don’t be afraid to just go straight to the site and add it directly!

Anyway, just to sum up, I’m over the moon excited about this project and hope it will turn out. I’ve been hoping something like this would be launched since writing about Muniforge and am excited to both see it happening and be involved.

Least Shocking Headline: Our Government Ignored Data about the Census

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Since the resignation of Deputy Minister Munir Sheikh and his public repudiation of voluntary long form census it has become clear that Industry Minister Clement has – at best – been misleading the public about the advice he received from statscan.

Now more evidence has emerged showing how the Government was well informed about the significant problems their plan would create. As Steven Chase of the Globe and Mail writes:

For instance, the real 2006 census long-form found that renting households as a percentage of the population in Canada had dropped by 3.08 percentage points from the 2001 census.

But when the Statscan study simulated the results of a voluntary 2006 long-form – which reflect the lower response rates expected in optional surveys – it got a markedly different answer. Calculations instead indicated that rented dwellings in Canada as a share of the population declined by 8.07 percentage points from 2001.

The difference – nearly five percentage points – suggests a voluntary survey in 2006 would have massively undercounted renting households.

So a mere 150% difference. Which, of course, might affect how every city in Canada considered zoning issues and adjust policies around the housing and rentals stock.

Again, if the Government wants to scrap the long-form census, that’s their prerogative. And I suppose we can’t be surprised that a government that wants less data and information to inform decisions would ignore data that showed them the negative consequence of their proposal. I mean, when you’ve already decided evidence doesn’t matter in crime policy, health policy and a myriad of other issues, you aren’t suddenly going to decide the collecting evidence is important…

But if that is your conclusion, stick with it! Don’t lie to me and the Canadian public and claim it won’t have a dramatic impact on the quality of data the Government collects or an impact on how policy and services for Canadians are affected.

And, of course, given how sensitive the decision is, and how it will cascade down and impact businesses, non-profits, local, provincial and federal government decision making, I wish we’d had a chance to debate the merits of it before the decision was made. Who knows, such a debate might not have just saved the long form census, it might have save government a 10-point decline in the polls.

Links from Gov2.0 Summit talk and bonus material

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My 5 minute lightening fast jam packed talk (do I do other formats? answer… yes) from yesterday’s Gov2.0 summit hasn’t yet been has just been posted to youtube. I love that this year the videos have the slides integrated into it.

For those who were, and were not, there yesterday, I wanted to share links to all the great sites and organizations I cited during my talk, I also wanted to share one or two quick stories I didn’t have time to dive into:

VanTrash and 311:

Screen-shot-2010-09-09-at-3.07.32-AM-1024x640As one of the more mature apps in Vancouver using open data Vantrash keeps being showing us how these types of innovations just keep giving back in new and interesting ways.

In addition to being used by over 3000 households (despite never being advertised – this is all word of mouth) it turns out that the city staff are also finding a use for vantrash.

I was recently told that 311 call staff use Vantrash to help trouble shoot incoming calls from residents who are having problems with garbage collection. The first thing one needs to do in such a situation is identify which collection zone the caller lives in – turns out VanTrash is the fastest and more effective way to accomplish this. Simply input the caller’s address into the top right hand field and presto – you know their zone and schedule. Much better than trying to find their address on a physical map that you may or may not have near your station.

TaxiCity, Open Data and Game Development

Another interesting spin off of open data. The TaxiCity development team, which recreated downtown Vancouver in 2-D using data from the open data catalog, noted that creating virtual cities in games could be a lot easier with open data. You could simply randomize the height of buildings and presto an instant virtual city would be ready. While the buildings would still need to be skinned one could recreate cities people know quickly or create fake cities that felt realistic as they’d be based on real plans. More importantly, this process could help reduce the time and resources needed to create virtual cities in games – an innovation that may be of interest to those in the video game industry. Of course, given that Vancouver is a hub for video game development, it is exactly these types of innovations the city wishes to foster and will help sustain Vancouver’s competitive advantage.

Links (in order of appearance in my talk)

Code For America shirt design can be seen in all their glory here and can be ordered here. As a fun aside, I literally took that shirt of Tim O’Reilly’s back! I saw it the day before and said, I’d wear that on stage. Tim overheard me and said he’d give me his if I was serious…

Vancouver’s Open Motion (or Open3, as it is internally referred to by staff) can be read in the city’s PDF version or an HTML version from my blog.

Vancouver’s Open Data Portal is here. keep an eye on this page as new data sets and features are added. You can get RSS feed or email updates on the page, as well as see its update history.

Vantrash the garbage reminder service’s website is here. There’s a distinct mobile interface if you are using your phone to browse.

ParkingMobility, an app that crowdsources the location of disabled parking spaces and enables users to take pictures of cars illegally parked in disabled spots to assist in enforcement.

TaxiCity, the Centre for Digital Media Project sponsored by Bing and Microsoft has its project page here. Links to the sourcecode, documentation, and a ton of other content is also available. Really proud of these guys.

Microsoft’s Internal Vancouver Open Data Challenge fostered a number of apps. Most have been opensourced and so you can get access to the code as well. The apps include:

The Graffiti Analysis written by University of British Columbia undergraduate students can be downloaded from this blog post I posted about their project.

BTA Works – the research arm of Bing Thom Architects has a great website here. You can’t download their report about the future of Vancouver yet (it is still being peer-reviewed) but you can read about it in this local newspaper article.

Long Tail of Public Policy – I talk about this idea in some detail in my chapter on O’Reilly Media’s Open Government. There is also a brief blog post and slide from my blog here.

Vancouver’s Open Data License – is here. Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto use essentially the exact same thing. Lots that could be done on this front still mind you… Indeed, getting all these cities on a single standard license should be a priority.

Vancouver Data Discussion Group is here. You need to sign in to join but it is open to anyone.

Okay, hope those are interesting and helpful.

The Challenge of Open Data and Metrics

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One promise of open data is its ability to inform citizens and consumers about the quality of local services. At the Gov 2.0 Summit yesterday the US Department of Health and Human Resources announced it was releasing data on hospitals, nursing homes and clinics in the hopes that developers will create applications that show citizens and consumers how their local hospitals stacks up against others. In short, how good, or even how safe, is their local hospital?

In Canada we already have some experience with this type of measuring. The Fraser Institute publishes an annual report card of schools performance in Alberta, BC, Ontario and Washington. (For those unfamiliar with the Fraser Institute it is a right-wing think tank based in Vancouver with, shall we say, dubious research credentials but strong ideological and fundraising goals.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, private schools do rather well in the Fraser Institute’s report card. Indeed it would appear (and I may be off by one here) that the t0p 18 schools on the list are all private. This does support a narrative that private schools are inherently better than state run schools that would be consistent with the Fraser Institute’s outlook. But, of course, that would be a difficult conclusion to sustain. Private schools tend to be populated with kids from wealthy families with better educated parents and have been given a blessed head start in life. Also, and not noted in the report card, is that many private schools are comfortable turfing out under-performing or unruly students. This means that the “delayed advancement rate,” one critical metric of a schools performance, is dramatically less impacted than a public school that cannot as easily send students packing.

Indeed, the Fraser Institute’s report card is rife with problems, something that teachers unions and, say,  equally ideological but left-oriented think tanks like the Centre for Policy Alternatives are all too happy to point out.

While I loath the Fraser Institute’s simplistic report card and think it is of dubious value to parents I do like that they are at least trying to give parents some tool by which to measure schools. The notion that schools, teachers and education quality can’t be measured, or are too complicated to measure is untenable. I suspect few parent – especially those in say, jobs where they are evaluated – believe it. Nor does such a position help parents assess the quality of education their child is receiving. While they understand, may be sympathetic to or even agree that this is a complicated issue it seems clear based on the success of Ontario’s school locator that many parents want and like these tools.

Ultimately the problem here isn’t the open data (despite what critics of the Ontario Government’s school comparison website would have you believe). Besides, are we now going to hide or suppress data so that parents can’t assess their kids schools? Nor is the problem school report cards per se. If anything is the problem it is that the Fraser Institute has had the field all to itself to play in. If teachers groups, other think tanks, or any other group believes that the Fraser Institute’s report cards are not too crude, why not design a better one? The data is available (and the government could easily be pressured to make more of it available). Why don’t teacher’s groups share with parents the metrics by which they believe parents should evaluate and compare schools? What this issue could use is some healthy competition and debate – one that generated more options and tools for parents.

The challenge for government is to make data more easily available. By making educational data more accessible, less time, IT skills and energy is needed to organize the data and precious resources can instead be focused on developing and visualizing the scoring methodology. This is certainly seems to be Health and Human Services approach: lower transaction costs, galvanize a variety of assessment applications and foster a healthy debate. It would be nice if ministries of education in Canada took a similar view.

But the second half of that challenge is also important, and groups outside of government need to recognize they can have a role, and the consequence of not participating. The mistake is to ask how to deal with groups like the Fraser Institute that use crude metrics, instead we need to encourage more groups and encourage our own organizations to contribute to the debate, to give it more nuance, and create better tools. Leaving the field to the Fraser Institute is a dangerous strategy, one that will serve few people. This is even more the case since in the future we are likely to have more, not less data about education, health and a myriad of other services and programs.

So, the challenge for readers is – will your organization participate?


Census Update and other chuckles

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Sorry for the lack of posts this week, blog was offline for a bit. (For geeks out there, I now have a company managing my blog for me and we we’re moving from a shared hosting service to a virtual private server – I should have less down time in the future – very excited).

Sadly, in that time there have been a bunch of fascinating developments on the census. As some of you may be aware a new poll by EKOS emerged today that has the Liberals and Conservatives dead even. More interesting however is how the census is playing a key role in the shift:

In seeking an explanation for these movements, we need look no further than the government’s ill-received decision to end the mandatory long form census. Not only does the shift of the highly educated support this conclusion, but a direct question on public approval for this decision provides compelling evidence that this move precipitated the current woes that the Conservative Party now faces.

When asked whether they felt that the privacy intrusion of the census justified a voluntary census or whether the lack of representativeness would cost us vital data, a clear majority of the public (56%) picked the latter (compared 26% who felt the mandatory long form was a violation of privacy). Even among Tory supporters, this appeal is not selling and there is an overwhelming lean to disapproval in the rest of the spectrum. Opposition to this decision is strongest among the university educated.

Of course, one of the retorts from pundits in favour of scrapping the long form census has been that only a few people care about this issue, it won’t matter in the medium term and it certainly won’t impact any election. For example:

Two things: I still standby my thesis that I believe that chucking mandatory nature of the long-form is a move to dismantle the welfare state (and that this is a move in the right direction). And two, nobody cares outside of the beehive. It’s the media that is pushing the story outside of the beehive walls propelled by the loud buzz of special interests.

Sigh, I suppose that 56% of  Canadians represent “a special interest.”

For me, both groups (56% and 26%) have legitimate concerns. As such, efforts by those in favour of this decision opposition as “special interest” driven are wrong and, frankly, disingenuous. Happily, they have failed. Indeed, the more these pundits try, the more they seem to make this a wedge issue in favour of those opposed to the decision. Mostly, I just think it would have been nice to have the issue debated before a decision was made.

More interesting has been another effort to defend trashing the long form census. I think Jack Mintz has thoroughly damaged his credibility with a terrible, contradictory and misleading op-ed in the Financial Post. Rather than dive into it, I encourage everyone to wander over to Aaron Wherry’s fantastic (and, unlike this post, short) dismantling of it. He’s already done all the heavy lifting.

Finally, just because I could help but notice the irony… I see that Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz has an oped in the Mark in which he is worried about the role that the police is taking lobbying to keep the registry alive:

Taxpayers should be incensed at the CACP for co-opting the role of policy-maker. When law enforcement managers try to write the laws they enforce, history has taught us we risk becoming a state where police can dictate our personal freedoms.

I, of course, agree that it is dangerous for the police to get involved in policy debates. I now eagerly away for Garry Breitkreuz to demand that the RCMP own up to the funding of fake “research” in an effort to distort the debate on Insite and harm reduction policies. It would seem that someone at the RCMP, or higher up, doesn’t believe that should happen.

But on further review, maybe we shouldn’t get to excited. Looking at Garry’s website, and specifically, this PDF he’s made available for download, it seems like he’s actually quite keen to have police force members be outspoken about the gun registry as long as they agree with his view.

Ah, hypocrisy. If only he didn’t make it so easy.

Bugzilla – progress made and new thoughts

A few weeks ago I published a post entitled Some Thoughts on Improving Bugzilla. The post got a fair bit a traction and received a large number of supportive comments. But what was best, about the post, about open source, about Mozilla, is that it drew me into a serious of conversations with people who wanted to make some of it reality.

Specifically, I’d like to thank Guy Pyrzak over at Bugzilla and Clint Talbert at Mozilla both of whom spent hours entertaining and conversing about these ideas with me, problem solving them and, if we are really honest, basically doing all the heavy lifting to transform them from ideas on this blog into real changes.

So in this post I have two things to share. First is an update on progress from the ideas in the last post (which will be this post) as well as some new thoughts about how Mozilla instance of Bugzilla could be further improved (which will be my next post).

So here we go…

Update!

1. Simplifying Menus

First up I made some suggestions around simplifying the bugzilla landing page. These were pretty cosmetic, but they make the landing page a little less intimidating to a new user and, frankly, nicer for everyone. We are presently drafting up the small changes to the code that would require this change and getting ready to submit it as a proposal. Status – Yellow.

2. Gather more information about our users (and, while I’m at it, some more simplifying)

Second, I outlined some ideas for streamlining the process of joining bugzilla and on the data we collect about users.

On the first part, which is about the steamlined pages (designed to help ensure that true bug submitters end up in bugzilla and not those seeking support) here too we will be submitting some new proposed pages shortly. Status – Yellow

On the second part I suggested that we ask users if they English is their second language and that we mark new bugzilla accounts with a “new” symbol. Guy is coding up an extension to Bugzilla that will both of these. Once done, I’ll suggest to Mozilla that they include this extension in their instance. Status – Green.

3. Make Life Easier for Users and the Triage Guys

I thought we could make life more efficient for triage and users if we added a status where bugs could be declared “RESOLVED-SUPPORT.” There’s been some reception to this idea. However, the second part of this idea is that once a bug is tagged as such a script automatically should scan the support database, find articles with a strong word correlation to the bug description and email the bug submitter links to those pages. Once again, Guy has stepped forward to develop such an extension which hopefully will be working in the not to distant future. Status – Green.

4. Make Bugzilla Celebrate, enhance our brand and build community

But probably the most exciting part is the final suggestion. That we send (at least non-developers) much nicer emails celebrating that the bug they submitted has been patched. It turns out (hardly surprising) that I wasn’t the first person to think that Bugzilla should be able to send HTML emails. Indeed, that feature request was first made back in 2001 and, when I blogged about this the other week, had not be updated since 2006. Once again, Guy has proven to be unbelievably helpful. It turns out that due to some changes to bugzilla many of the blocks to patching this had disappeared and so he has been working on the code. Status – Green.

Lots here for many people to be proud of. Hopefully some of these ideas will go live in the not too distant future. That said, still many hurdles to clear and if you are a decision maker on any of these and would like to talk about these ideas, please do not hesitate to contact me.